New Website! Part 2: Blogs of the Round Table

As part of the site redesign, we’ve been changing the way that our key posts look. One of the more recent features to get a makeover is Blogs of the Round Table (BoRT). You can see the redesign in action on September’s BoRT roundup.

For those less familiar with it: BoRT is a non-curated monthly feature that encourages bloggers to write in conversation with one another. Every month there is a new theme selected by facilitator Mark Filipowich, and readers are encouraged to submit links to their own blog content written on that theme over the course of the month. By including the magical BoRT dropdown menu in their post, all articles written for that month’s theme get linked together, so that people are encouraged to write in response to each other. Our hope is that BoRT is a fertile area for writers to grow, helping ideas to cross-pollinate, and allowing great conversations to flourish.

The goals of the Blogs of the Round Table redesign are:

Get a bigger audience for BoRT so that it works as a better platform for writers to increase their own audience

Move past that “wall of text” feeling so that roundups are more pleasant to read

Make writers feel excited to see their posts in the roundups

Celebrate writers who put things forward for BoRT by making their names more prominent

The focal point of BoRT is now a series of “cards”, each one containing a different piece of writing. When videos, photo essays, or podcasts get submitted we’ll adapt the card designs accordingly, and we’ll be excited to do so! If you want your writing featured in one of these swanky boxes, there’s still time to submit to October’s Blogs of the Round Table.